


Shift (Your World)

by orphan_account



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Abandoned Work - Unfinished and Discontinued, Alternate Universe - Shapeshifters, Animorphs AU, But no aliens, Evil Hunters, F/M, Gen, M/M, Magic, Nemeton, why do i use words
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-03-26
Updated: 2014-03-31
Packaged: 2018-01-17 01:50:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 14,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1369468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They hadn't realized just what they were walking into, that night they went into the preserve - just four dumb kids and one grouchy land-owner. And now they are in over their heads and can turn into animals, and there are hunters trying to kill them to get the magic they are protecting, and what are they supposed to do? They've still got to take finals.</p>
<p>[or, that Animorphs AU]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Beginning

**Author's Note:**

> I suppose this is the part where I go AKJSDKLFJJAJSDKFJDS%#&*(*@#%@#!!! about recent interviews/happenings/etc on this show, and my GOD I love these characters but I don't love what the show or the writers are doing, so I'm retreating into happy fandom land and writing absolutely ridiculous fic instead. Therapy? HAHAHAHA LET'S GO WITH IT.
> 
> Animorphs was my WORLD when I was growing up, and I've obviously borrowed a lot heavily from the series while making it a Teen Wolf twist that works better given the reality of Beacon Hills, so hopefully it works for people who aren't familiar with the original series and those who are can have fun spotting all the things I've used.
> 
> I know people are WHY about WIPs, and I am one of those people as well, so here's where I say that I respond quite well to flail and comments and people prodding me in-between the ribs like WRITE FASTER WTF IS WRONG WITH YOU, so there's that. <3

There are birds singing softly in the treetops, a rhythmic cascade of ascending tones, and it’s bittersweet to be hearing something so beautiful as you’re dying.

The underbrush trips you, front legs buckling before your hands find the nearest tree bark and cling, hauling your weight back up. You aren’t steady, but there’s little that can be done for that; the ache in your side is more pronounced, now, and throbbing in steady beats with your heart. You can taste the blood in the back of your throat, and you know there isn’t much time left - the forest knows, too, around you, and the falling leaves drip like tears against your shoulders.

The protective field, once spread out like a web with gentle, sticky ends, is breaking. It took less time than you imagined for it to fall, and you should have prepared far before now, when your life is bleeding out on the dead leaves your hooves are crunching over. There are hundreds of things that should have been done, but perhaps there is no real use in thinking on them now - the past can’t be undone, and regret is not the feeling you wish to go out choking on.

Fingers slide over smooth wood as you fall, again, and catch yourself on the worn surface of the top of the axed tree. There are chutes of green rising up from the crack in the tree’s rings, but it’s not enough. It won’t be enough to strengthen the web for several more months, and those are months you simply do not have. The hunter’s bolt in your side, wedged between the torn and aching muscles the tip of it pierced on the way in, tells you everything you need to know.

You have failed. You have failed to protect this place, and they have come for it.

Gasping, you sink over the Nemeton. There is a pulse to its power, but it’s weak; it needs time to grow a stronger field, to fill the holes left gaping since the last guardians were killed. You are the only thing left, and when you die, so will the rest of the barrier. They will find it, drawn to its magic like the conquistadors, and they will plunder it until there is nothing left.

You breathe into the bits of dust and spores on the top of the stump’s flat surface. You are the last, and you are dying, and the Nemeton sings sorrow into your ears that melts into trembling muscles and wheezing sobs. With all the strength left in you, you reach out in the web - further, betwixt the strands and cords that make up the faltering, tenuous shield around the woods - and call and scream and beg for someone to hear you.

\--

“Dude, the fact that you are doing this to impress a girl is _completely lame_ ,” Stiles says, even as he’s half-rolling, half-tumbling out of the driver’s side of his Jeep and only belatedly remembering to turn the lights off.

“But you wanted to come to the preserve and look around after those police reports came in about the possible ex-convict moving through here,” Scott replies.

Stiles shoves his keys in his pockets, fingers tangling in the metal, and sighs. “Yes. Of course I did, but I didn’t want to come here to _impress a girl_. I wanted to come here to find adventure and possibly a murderous crazy person, and be superheroes or something.”

“It still ends with us coming here,” Scott says, still trying, and Stiles is about to add something more when a second pair of headlights turns into the small clearing they use as a makeshift parking lot, and Scott’s face goes blissful. “Here she is!”

“Not the point, Scott,” Stiles mumbles, but he’s ignored due to the fact that Scott tends to develop Allison-specific attention whenever she is anywhere near his general vicinity. Stiles doesn’t have anything against Allison, because she’s really quite nice, but it still smarts when Scott forgets he exists for prolonged periods of time. The person in question is stepping out of her car, followed by a second figure from the passenger seat.

“Allison, hey,” Scott says, as if their appearance was somehow unexpected and wonderful. “And Lydia, hi.”

“So, this is your bonding activity?” Lydia says pointedly to Allison, curling her arms around her torso to pull her jacket in tighter. From the purse of her mouth, she seems unhappy with the arrangements. “Running off into the woods and trying to get killed?”

Allison just sort of shrugs at Scott, looking sheepish and happy and altogether sort of the perfect match to Scott’s puppy dog eyes. “We thought it might be fun to explore a bit.”

“At night,” Lydia points out. “When we’ve been specifically warned against this by the local law enforcement.”

“To be fair, they don’t actually expect that the escaped con is still here,” Stills offers.

Lydia glares at him, eyes narrow. “Oh, well now I feel _so_ much better.”

From his backpack, Scott produces two flashlights, and turns both on before handing one to Stiles and keeping the other for himself. “I brought these, but my mom only had two of them.”

“Perfect,” Allison says, still smiling. She loops an arm through Scott’s. “Lead the way.”

Stiles sidles over to Lydia and gestures with the flashlight, causing the beam of light to jump around the tree line.

“So, you and me...” he starts.

Lydia ignores him and hurries to catch up with Allison and Scott instead.

“That’s great,” Stiles calls after her. “You look really nice tonight!”

The woods aren’t nearly as quiet as Stiles expected they would be. Between the buzz of the insects and the gentle swaying of the breeze through the leaves, coupled with their own footsteps as they tromp through the underbrush, it’s a bizarrely comfortable level of not-quiet. He stays behind the others, letting Scott be the one to light up their pathway and using his own flashlight to check out the bushes and gnarled tree roots near them.

“Do you think we’ll find, like, a coyote?” Stiles asks.

“Coyotes are mostly scavengers,” Lydia says over her shoulder, without really turning around to look at him. “So unless you plan to become a dead body...”

Ahead, Allison’s grip on Scott’s arm tightens, though given what he knows about Allison, Stiles suspects its more pretense than anything else; Allison Argent doesn’t seem to scare easily.

“I think I’d prefer being alive,” Stiles responds. He doesn’t think Lydia actually bothers to pay attention. The plants, bits that are half-green and half-brown, in the strange middle state of autumn, crunch under his shoes a bit out of time with the rest of them. Behind him, there’s a shake of a branch and he startles, turning so that he can swing his flashlight around to catch it. There’s nothing there but a still trembling bush, and Stiles tries to ignore the shiver that runs down his spine.

“Guys,” he calls, and they’ve gotten a little ahead of him in the pause. “Guys!”

He’s running to catch up with them when the figure comes charging through the bushes at them. One of the branches whips and snaps Stiles in the face - he’s more concerned with whether or not his nose is bleeding than the fact that a person just _came out of nowhere at them_ , particularly once he realizes in his pain-induced haze that the figure is yelling at them.

Really, really yelling at them.

“-you guys doing here?!” the guy says, with a voice that sounds lower and a few years older than them. “This is private property, and it’s pitch black. Do you have a death wish?”

“Sorry,” Scott says, sputtering a bit. “We didn’t know. We just wanted to look around.”

Stiles points his flashlight at the newcomer, who growls a little and holds a hand up to shield his face from the intensity of the beam. He’s definitely older than them, and wearing a leather coat that is probably supposed to make him look intimidating or like he’s part of a biker gang.

“We’re really sorry,” Allison tells him. She’ll probably have better luck escaping unharmed than Scott, since leather-dude is glaring at Scott as if Scott is his sole source of misfortune. “We’ll just go and-”

“Who are you?” Stiles interrupts her.

This seems to surprise everyone a bit, including leather-dude. “What?” the guy asks.

“Who _are_ you?” Stiles repeats. “You said this was private property, but the preserve hasn’t been owned by anybody since the fire.”

Leather-dude levels Stiles a long and slightly frightening look before grunting out, “Derek.”

“Derek?” Scott asks, just as Stiles puts two and two together and says, “Derek _Hale_?”

“ _Yes,_ Derek grits out, and he’s definitely annoyed now. “Which means it’s _my_ property and you shouldn’t be traipsing around on it.”

Allison starts to move, tugging at Scott’s arm like she’ll lead him away and back in the direction of the cars. She probably doesn’t know the story about the fire at the Hale house that killed nearly the entire family, since she’s pretty new to school and it happened so many years ago that it’s not brought up much, but she still seems to realize they should undoubtedly be heading back (the last thing any of them need is to get hit with a trespassing charge, because Stiles’ dad would _kill_ him). It isn’t until Stiles turns, too, that he realizes Lydia hasn’t moved or said anything for the past five minutes, and is staring out at something he can’t see in the blackness of the woods around them.

“Lydia?” Stiles tries.

“Do you hear that?” she asks, sort of quiet and confused, like maybe she really isn’t sure what’s happening, either.

Stiles goes quiet, but can’t pick anything out outside of the sound of their own breathing. “Hear what?”

“I think there’s something over there,” she says. She sounds very faraway - lost in her own head. “Something crying.”

“Lydia, what-” Allison starts, and then Lydia surges forward through the trees. She’s pushing branches aside, and she doesn’t have one of the flashlights, so Stiles takes about half a second before he charges in after her. There’s a muffled curse behind them that might have been Derek, and more footsteps at his heels, and Lydia’s moving _fast_ , way faster than she should be when she can’t tell where she’s going or what’s beneath her feet and could easily twist an ankle or break her leg falling down into a ravine.

“Lydia!” Stiles calls, and behind him he can hear Derek saying, “I’m _serious_ , get her and go _back to your car._ ”

There’s a bit of nothing where Stiles is afraid that _he’s_ going to be the one to fall and fracture a bone somewhere pretty important and possibly life-threatening, and then he nearly bows right into Lydia, who has gone abruptly still and is standing at the edge of a clearing bathed in moonlight.

It’s so bright that he doesn’t even need the flashlight. He’s never seen the moon be so big in the sky before, he’s never seen the grass look to be the color of the sea; he switches the light beam off and stares, stares into the clearing at the large tree stump that might have once been a huge, beautiful tree, and the creature that is crumpled at the side of it, half-slumped over the smooth top.

“Jesus,” Scott whispers, from behind him. “What _is_ that?”

Stiles has never seen anything like it outside of MMORPGs and mythology textbooks - it’s like a cross between a human and a deer, like a centaur, a human torso atop the body of a horse. Only it’s not even normal then, either, it’s kind of blue and the head is only human until you see the big, clear eyes and the downturned, flat nose.

It’s kind of _beautiful_ , in a really screwed-up, dreamlike way.

“I think she’s dying,” Lydia says, and starts to walk towards it.

“Lydia!” Scott hisses, but Lydia ignores him. She moves towards the creature, both bathed in moonlight so that Lydia’s hair looks oddly purple, and the human-deer hybrid doesn’t get up. It does lift a head, only slightly, before collapsing against the giant tree stump once more, and Stiles knows that Lydia is right: the creature is dying.

Lydia kneels before it, hands on her knees and skirt pooling around her boots.

“You came,” the creature rasps, and its voice isn’t what Stiles expected at all. It’s high and light, almost like bells, and if he focuses too closely on it, he can’t understand it anymore. He’s never heard anything quite like it - but then again, he’s never seen anything as weird and bizarre as the situation he’s currently watching unfold. Unbidden, and against his better judgment, he moves in closer so he can get a better look at what’s going on.

“You called,” Lydia whispers.

Stiles moves closer, and hears the others doing the same thing behind him.

“What is this place?” Allison asks, voice full of wonder.

“It’s called the Nemeton,” the deer-creature tells them, “and if they find it, everyone will suffer at their hands.”

Something twists in Stiles’ gut. “Who is ‘they’?” he asks, and he’s not really sure he wants to know the answer.

“The hunters,” the creature answers. “They hunt magic, and this place holds more than they could ever dream of. I have been protecting it, but I am the last of my kind, and when I am gone, there will be no one left to keep them away.”

“I don’t understand,” Derek says, and Stiles is a little surprised that the guy is still with them. “This is my family’s land; what is this doing here?”

The creature starts to cough, a horrible, wet sound, and when it shifts, Stiles can suddenly see the reason for it - a bolt, from a crossbow, lodged in its haunches. There is blood matted in the fur around the metal and it has soaked down, lost somewhere beneath the deer-like belly.

“You’re dying,” Scott whispers.

“Yes,” the creature agrees - maybe it sounds a bit sad. Stiles doesn’t know how bell tones can sound so full of anguish. “You can’t let them reach the magic in the Nemeton. There are barriers around it, and they protect it, but they, too, are weak, and need time to regain their full strength. Until then, everyone is at risk. If they control the Nemeton, everyone is doomed.”

“Lydia said that you called her,” Allison says. She drops closer, to Lydia’s side, and kneels down on the grass beside the other girl. “Why did you call us here if we could have been hunters, too?”

“It has to be passed on,” the creature tells them.

Stiles looks at Scott, who seems confused and lost. It’s way too much - there’s no way this can be real. But unless Stiles is having a very vivid, shared dream experience with the others, he can’t quite find a way to write it off, either. There’s something strange about the air, something heavy and thick and full of _promise_ and he knows that whatever the deer-creature is, it’s not trying to hurt them. And he’s pretty sure that it’s telling the truth. After all, _something_ shot it with a cross bolt.

“What has to be passed on?” Allison asks.

“The magic,” Lydia answers, instead, and perhaps she’s known all along. “You have to give it to someone.”

“But you said the magic was in the Neme....thing,” Scott tries.

The creatures breathing is growing weaker. Stiles can hear the wetness in its lungs, congealing with each ragged gulp of air. There probably isn’t much time. He doesn’t know deer, or human-deer creature anatomy, but that bolt probably hit at least three vital organs and at the rate of blood loss, well...

“The magic to hold the barriers in place is in me,” the creature explains. “And it needs to be passed on, until the Nemeton is strong enough again to hold it on its own. You have to protect it.”

“Who, Lydia?” Stiles asks.

“All of you.”

Stiles looks at Scott again, who seems less confused and more... determined, the sort of look in his eyes that he gets when he starts thinking they can make first line at lacrosse again. And behind him is Derek, who still hasn’t bolted or run away or tried to yell at the deer-creature for also being on his family property, though his eyebrows are sending a strong message about his reluctance to believe this whole thing.

“What do we have to do?” Scott asks.

“Stay safe,” the creature says. “Stay alive. Keep the hunters away from the Nemeton’s magic.”

“But we’re just kids,” Allison tells it, and Stiles has never thought about agreeing more.

“Yeah, and these... hunters... they obviously have weapons. _Sharp_ weapons. Weapons to _kill us,_ ” Stiles adds.

Another rasping, awful-sounding cough from the deer-thing, and they are running out of time. The moonlight bathing the clearing is starting to falter, like the moon itself is being held aloft by the tree stump’s wavering power.

“You, too, will acquire weapons, with the magic,” the deer-creature says. “It will change you. It will allow you to become part of the forest and the magic here, in the form of an animal.”

“Any animal?” Scott asks, obviously already thinking of all the possibilities of becoming his neighbor’s dog or a great white shark or something.

“One animal,” is the answer. “The animal of your spirit.”

Okay, so they can’t _pick_ the animal, but still, shape-shifting is pretty cool. “And we can use this to fight the hunters?”

“And hide,” Allison adds, “since the magic would be in us to keep the barrier up, and if they find us...”

“But there’s a drawback,” Lydia says, like she just _knows_. “There’s always a drawback.”

The creature nods, weakly, and the blood on its side beneath the crossbow wound is starting to sheen again - it’s wet. It’s _new_ blood, that hasn’t congealed and sealed, and that’s a bad sign. Stiles knows that’s a bad sign.

“You must never stay in your animal form for more than two hours,” it says. “Or else you cannot turn back.”

“Two hours,” Scott repeats.

“This is crazy,” Derek says, and when Stiles looks back at him, the man is shaking his head. “My family...”

“Protected this land,” the creature finishes.

Lydia stands up, and Allison follows.

“Okay,” Lydia says. “What do we do?”

“Put your hands on the Nemeton,” the creature instructs them. There’s a twisting in his abdomen saying _run, run, get out now_ and Stiles ignores it as he rounds the giant stump and stands on Allison’s other side, reaching towards the smoothed top. It doesn’t feel any different from normal tree stumps. The others join, until the five of them all have their palms against the surface.

“What now?” Scott asks.

The deer-creature gives out a sigh - like a breeze blowing through a field and rustling all of the leaves. It sounds like nothing and everything at once, and the creature slumps forward further against the stump, and Stiles _feels_ it running up his fingers, his palm, his wrist, until the buzzing is all over his body at once, bees beneath his skin. He wants to jerk his hand back away from the stump, but can’t command his body to move; he’s rooted in place, stuck, with muscles trembling and spasming. It lasts a second, maybe two, and then is suddenly gone. He stumbles backwards and stares at his palm, though there are no marks anywhere there save the scar he got three years ago cutting himself with the good knives trying to make dinner for his dad.

“That’s it?” Allison asks.

“Yes,” the deer-creature sighs. The light has nearly completely gone out of its eyes. “It’s yours now.”

There’s a sudden crash in the distance, loud and obvious, and Stiles nearly jumps out of his skin from the shock of it. He doesn’t need magic or anything else to tell him what it means - the hunters are here, and they are coming to finish the job they started with the cross bolt. Scott grabs for Allison’s arm.

“Go,” the creature commands. It sounds sad and defeated and very, very close to death. “Run.”

“But... the Nemeton...” Lydia starts.

“The barrier will shield it,” the creature says. “They will not be able to use it as long as you are alive.”

Scott starts to move, taking Allison - his flashlight is back in his hand, and Stiles feels a sense of pride sweep through his form, because his best friend is, if nothing else, brave in the face of almost certain death. There’s more crashing, and shouting now, words that Stiles can’t quite make out yet but that are definitely moving closer to them.

Someone shoves at him from behind, towards the woods once more, and it takes him a second to realize that it’s Derek. “Go!” the other man hisses, and Stiles’ legs comply with choppy, halting steps towards the trees.

“Wait!” he says, and stops, twisting, ignoring the sharp spike of pain where Derek has his wrist captured between too-tight fingers. “What’s your name?”

The creature is barely breathing, stark and hollow in the moonlight. For a wild second, he thinks that it’s already dead and he was too late; then the creature’s fingers twitch slightly, and he hears the twinkle of bells again. “Loren,” is the faint, barely-there answer, before Derek is dragging him once more towards the trees whether or not Stiles’ feet will move.

The hunters are behind them, but fear is a powerful motivator. Stiles doesn’t want to think what one of those crossbolts will do to his delicate, human flesh - or what his death would do to his father. He chokes back bile as he starts to move, terrified and overwhelmed, following Scott’s dancing flashlight beam a few yards in front of him. Derek is behind him, and Lydia a few legs in front, and they make a loud, crashing party through the woods.

He just hopes the hunters are too preoccupied with the deer-creature to follow.

Somehow, they make it back to their cars. Stiles thinks he might throw up, his heart hammering in his chest and blocking his throat, and he drops his keys twice before he can get them in the ignition. Scott almost slams his fingers in the passenger door after throwing himself inside.

“Go, _go_ ,” Scott orders, and Stiles glances out the window to Derek, standing by the side of the car and frantically motioning the same command with one hand.

“Wait, Derek,” Stiles starts.

“He’ll be fine, I’m sure,” Scott says. “Stiles, drive!”

Allison is already out onto the highway when Stiles manages to get the Jeep in reverse and backs out onto the paved road. He gives one last look at Derek, who is staring at the woods, before hitting the accelerator and putting as much distance between the trees and the car as possible.

It isn’t until he gets home, after he’s stammered out a good-night to his father and stripped off his hoodie, that he realizes he can’t get his hands to stop shaking.

\--

Allison starts awake feeling as if all the air has been sucked from her lungs, and her phone trilling a text alert from her beside table. She pushes up strands of hair that have gotten caught on her skin - on the sheen of cold sweat that has formed there and stayed, drying, into a film she’ll have to scrub at to get off.

_Have you tried it yet?_ says the text from Lydia, with nothing else. It’s vague enough that anyone reading wouldn’t know what it was talking about: the new shade of lipstick she bought from M.A.C., the jacket that she got to wear over the floral mini-dress, the new seasonal coffee brew from the Seattle’s Best down the street. But Allison knows what she means, and for a half second, a weak half second that she hates immediately, she wishes she didn’t.

She’d gone to bed hoping it was all some strange sort of dream, and woken with the illusion shattered.

_Not yet_ , she types back, and isn’t sure why she _should_ try in the first place. The entire idea is just crazy enough to make her think the whole thing was an elaborate trick, but Lydia doesn’t buy into anything that she can’t disprove, and if Lydia has already sent her a message, it means that the other girl has already tried.

Tried and done it successfully.

There isn’t a response right away, so Allison gets up and takes a wash cloth to her face, washing until her skin is pink and clean. The kitchen is empty and there’s a note on the island telling her that her parents went to the grocery store - a normal, standard chore for Saturday morning. But everything around Allison feels strange and new, like an itch just beneath her skin that she can’t quite scratch.

She goes to her room, closes the door, and stands in the middle.

“This is ridiculous,” she says, with her hands held out at her sides. She doesn’t even know what she’s supposed to be _doing_. The events from last night didn’t give any information on how exactly the animal-shifting was supposed to work, other than the two-hour time limit that creeps like a ticking bomb in the back of Allison’s mind before she’s even done anything. Her heart is beating a mile a minute, and it’s probably not helping matters - she closes her eyes, tries to steady her breath, and concentrates.

She thinks about the Nemeton, the huge, sawed-down tree stump, and what the deer-creature had told them.

After a few moments of nothing save some tingles in her fingertips, she glances over her shoulder, irritated, at the full-length mirror hanging on the back of her bedroom door.

She has _feathers_. She can’t swallow back the yelp of surprise and stumbles backwards, calves hitting the mattress - not a lot of feathers, but a dusting of them across the back of her arms. They aren’t fully-formed yet, and she’s obviously halted the entire process by panicking. As she watches, they receded back into her skin, turning pink and sliding inward until there’s nothing there, and no mark to show there ever was.

She runs a finger over the back of her bicep, eyes glued to the mirror; if she hadn’t just seen what she did, she would have thought she was still dreaming.

Her phone dings again. Allison stares at it, but thinks she should continue before she reports back to Lydia about it. She has to make it the whole way through, now that she knows... now that she is fully convinced it wasn’t all a hoax.

She closes her eyes once more, and this time, lets the feeling of _change_ sweep over her. It’s easier when she gives into it, embraces it - she feels herself falling down, shorter, and becoming larger all at the same time. It’s a rearrangement of bones and sinewy muscle, until she has become not herself at all, but something bigger and more all-encompassing than she could have ever hoped to be.

She doesn’t need to open her eyes to know what she will see, because she can feel it in her veins, a second set of memories and knowledge superimposed upon her own, but she looks to the mirror anyway. The glass is so strongly defined that it nearly hurts, her eyes so well-developed that she can pick out the very place where each individual feather meets skin, the ridge of the curves and the darker dotted markings along her beak.

She is a hawk.

The hawk brain knows what it wants to do, and without consciously thinking, she flaps her wings upwards. It’s difficult without a warm burst of air in the room to ride, and takes effort to lift her weight off the floor, and then she just thinks, vaguely, that it’s a good thing her bedroom window was open as she takes off through it. Upon finding the thermals riding above the trees, she finds it far easier to fly - to soar. The wind shrieking against her face and an overwhelming sensation of _freedom_ as she rides the wind over the square houses interspersed with snaking gray roads, oval trees, and the harsh, metallic tops of the cars.

If she had a mouth, she would have screamed in pure joy. As it is, she screeches, proud and long and _joyous_ , for the feeling of elation and rapture she never knew she could feel, that she never knew existed. Even at her height, she can see everything down below, right down to the drivers in the car. She banks and curves, almost lazily, wings and body moving in a tandem she doesn’t understand yet doesn’t need to actively think about, and flying alongside one of the vehicles, she can make out the individual hands on the woman’s watch.

_I can’t believe this_ , she thinks, but she _can_ , because it’s a sensory overload. She doesn’t stray far, suddenly wary and hyper alert about the time limit. Getting back to her house is easy given how clear and bright all the shapes and colors are - she could have found her bedroom window half a mile away. She glides towards it easily, setting down on the windowsill and letting her talons dig in before hopping in further.

Coming back to her human self is almost painfully sad. Immediately, she feels a sense of loss and longing, already wishing to be back in the sky as part of something so much larger. Her fingertips are trembling against the grains of her bedroom carpet when she is fully herself once more, in her underwear and nothing else, and she supposes she should be glad that she managed to keep that on.

She reaches for her phone, and can’t even be bothered to try replying to Lydia’s message. She calls instead.

“You did it, didn’t you,” Lydia answers, without greeting.

“This can’t be real,” Allison tells her. She can still feel the wind against her feathered face. “There’s no way this is actually happening. I _flew_.”

“Fitting,” Lydia says, without a hint of sarcasm. “But remember - this isn’t just an amusement ride. There’s a reason we’ve been given this, and it’s to protect something.”

The reality of that is far harder to get a grasp on. “Like warriors?” Allison asks.

“Knights, maybe,” Lydia hums in agreement. “We should call the others, but I think we need to watch what we say, too. We don’t know where they are. Or what they can do, these hunters.”

With a start, Allison realizes that what she just did could have been incredibly dangerous. What if they had been watching her, knowing she was out at the preserve last night - what if they’d seen her streak out through her bedroom window as a hawk, and now knew where she was?

“We need to be careful, about where we shift,” Allison says.

“We need to be careful about _everything_ ,” Lydia replies, voice hard. Allison knows her friend, and Lydia has probably already worked through at least three problems and solutions the others haven’t even seen. “Call the others, and meet at my house in an hour.”

“What about your parents?”

Lydia laughs, though there isn’t much joy in it. “They’re gone again today. The house is ours. Don’t be late.”

There’s a small click of the phone as Lydia hangs up, and then nothing.


	2. The Warning

“I’m just saying, that while I know I _said_ that I wanted to get closer to Lydia and all, I kind of was hoping it would be through something that wouldn’t directly lead to my death,” Stiles says, as he slams the Jeep’s door closed and shoves his hands into his hoodie pockets.

“Maybe you can’t be that picky about the situation,” Scott shrugs, but his mind is elsewhere - on the fact that he didn’t sleep well the night before due to dreams of the deer-creature Loren dying again and large yellow eyes glaring at him through the dark woods - and on the fact that he had to lie to his mom this morning to get out of the house. _I’m hanging out with Stiles_ , he’d said, and while it wasn’t _totally_ a lie, he still feels pretty bad about it all the same.

Stiles keeps muttering to himself, and it’s one of those instances where Scott really doesn’t need to listen that closely, because Stiles doesn’t really expect a response. Allison’s car is already parked in the driveway, and Scott’s heartbeat skips ahead a little.

Lydia answers immediately when they knock on the front door. “Come on,” she says, impatiently, and her house stretches out like a mausoleum ahead of them, filled with fancy-looking vases and ornate rugs that probably cost a fortune; Lydia walks past and over everything without sparing a second glance, and Scott hurries to catch up, meeting Allison in the living room.

“What about Derek?” Stiles asks, when they sit and he tugs free a throw pillow that he accidentally half-sat on.

“Nobody has his number,” Lydia says.

“I hope he got away last night,” Stiles says, and looks at Scott with something that might be guilt. They _had_ left him behind to fend for himself, but Derek’s a few years older and can probably take care of himself, even if the hunter-things had ended up going after him.

Probably.

_Hopefully_.

“I think we need to go back into the woods,” Lydia tells them, without much preamble, and both Stiles and Scott start in surprise.

“Back into the woods?” Stiles repeats. “The woods crawling with things trying to _kill us_? Why, exactly, would we want to do something like _that_?”

“Because we have no idea what is going on here, or what we need to be doing, and the only answer we have right now is the Nemeton and Loren,” Lydia snaps.

Allison glances at Scott, quickly, just enough to throw his heart up into his throat, and then adds, “Loren is dead.”

“And we don’t know if her body is still there,” Lydia replies.

Stiles throws his head back against the couch cushions, displaying his neck in a curved arc and groaning. “Why do I feel like this is absolutely the _worst_ idea ever?”

“What if the hunters are there?” Scott asks, feeling a trembling thread of fear for the first time. Whatever they were, they obviously meant business - and they had weapons definitely capable of killing a handful of kids.

Lydia looks at him, really _looks_ at him, all disdain and annoyance, and after a long second where no one says anything and Scott starts to think that maybe he should have, she says, “Duh. That’s why we don’t go as _humans_.”

It takes a moment to sink in.

“Right,” Allison says. It sounds like she agrees, but she wraps her arms around her torso as if she’s cold. It’s a bit hard to handle, everything, and Scott’s still a moment or two behind because of his lack of sleep. His brain really isn’t processing the situation as well.

“Okay, but what are we looking for when we get there?” Stiles asks. “Clues, magical curses...?”

“We’re supposed to protect the Nemeton,” Lydia says, sharper than is necessary. “Shouldn’t it be obvious that we should be _around_ the thing at least once to figure out what to do?”

The room goes silent again, and Lydia looks back and forth between Scott and Stiles. “Have you two tried it yet?”

“Uh,” Stiles says, right as Scott starts with, “Well...”

When there’s still nothing, Stiles sort of laughs - a barking, mirthless sound that seems to be wrenched out of his throat involuntarily. “I sort of just thought, you know, _nightmare_ , crazy delusion...”

But Scott is looking at Allison instead, whose face has opened up a bit. It looks like she’s remembering something nice, something good, and the tension in her muscles has dissolved somewhat.

“You’ve done it?” he asks her, quiet, leaning in to perch his elbows on his knees. “You’ve become a... well?”

“Hawk,” she says, and one corner of her mouth quirks up.

The way she says it is so easy, so simple - like of course that’s what it was, of course this whole thing is real. Scott feels better, feels his heart sliding back into place a bit. She’s here with him, and she’s not freaked out about the situation around them, and just looking at her feels like something of a rock, solid and stable, that makes sense even when everything else doesn’t.

Scott is about the say something when there’s a thud over at the sliding glass door that leads out to Lydia’s backyard. When he turns to look, he finds white teeth and black fur and narrowed eyes glaring in at them through the portal.

It’s a wolf.

His brain registers this even as his body starts moving - jump up, heart hammering like crazy. Lydia is screaming in fright and Allison is moving, quicker than he thought possible, behind a chair like it will provide cover, and Stiles is freaking out and shouting, “Holy _shit_ , what the _fuck_ -” and Scott just feels like he can’t breathe. Something has shoved its hand into his chest cavity and tightened fingers around his organs and squeezed, constricting his entire torso until he’s dizzy with the force of it.

There’s a second of nothing but the fading of alarmed exclamations and ragged breathing, and then Stiles leans forward to get a better look and says, “ _Derek_?!”

_[Of course, you idiots,]_ Derek’s voice says in Scott’s head, and he sounds distinctly annoyed. _[How many other wolves are there wandering around Beacon Hills?]_

“Are you _insane?!_ ” Stiles cries, arms thrown out to either side. “You could have given us a heart attack! A real, collective heart attack, and then we’d all be dead, and you’d be to blame for it!”

“Someone might see you,” Lydia says. It’s a bit more practical, anyway, and Scott tries to focus on evening out his breathing after the awful fright they got. The wolf - _Derek_ \- is big and scruffy and definitely intimidating, and even now that he knows who it is, it still gives him goose bumps to look at. There’s just something about seeing teeth that big on the other side of a sliding glass door, particularly when the animal is growling.

“How did you find us?” Allison asks.

_[I can hear you a mile away,]_ Derek snorts. _[The wolf’s hearing is amazing. Come on, Lydia is right. You have to come and see something.]_

“The whole ‘Derek’s voice in my head thing’ is pretty creepy,” Stiles says, under his breath.

Scott shrugs. “But it’s good that we can still talk to each other, even as animals, right?”

“When did this become our lives?” Stiles asks, and he doesn’t sound angry, not particularly, just a strangely curious neutral. He adjusts his sweatshirt over his shoulders and frowns, down at their shoes, which neither of them bothered to take off before walking inside the house. “Like, hey, buddy, good thing we can telepathically communicate as magical animals, I was really worried otherwise.”

Scott looks over at the girls, and then has to work _extra_ hard to control his reaction, because they are _starting to take off their clothes_. “Whoa!” he cries, and holds his hands up - unsure why, but Allison is literally pulling her shirt up over her head to reveal the white camisole beneath it. “Whoa, what-”

“You’ll shred anything clothing besides the very bottom layer,” Allison explains, but her cheeks are kind of pink and she doesn’t meet his eyes as she starts on her belt buckle.

When Scott looks back to Stiles, the other boy’s face is very slack, eyes wide.

“I honestly can’t tell if this just got better or worse,” he mumbles.

“Hurry _up_ ,” Lydia huffs, and throws her dress on the ground before shaking the loose tendrils of her hair back over her shoulders. “Can you please grow up a little and get with the program? We’ve done this before, and you haven’t, and you have approximately two minutes to follow before we leave you behind.”

Stiles doesn’t need any more prompting - he goes for his sweatshirt and shrugs it off, and starts on his shirt.

“What a weird morning,” he grumbles, and Scott agrees before stepping out of his pants.

\--

It feels much different moving through the woods as something other than human.

Around her, Lydia sees flashes of the others - Allison soaring above the tree line in a rustle of gold and brown feathers, Stiles moving through the underbrush almost silently with his white-tipped tail and black sock paws. Derek is further away, a tireless runner over the upturned roots, and Scott is on the opposite side, not quite as fast as a black bear but all rippling muscles and hundreds of pounds of body weight.

Lydia doesn’t stick to the ground as much. The cougar’s mind wants to be up in the branches, digging into the bark with claws that instinctively know how to silence movement and focus on the world around her. Moving with the coiled muscles that spring and release in bounds is exhilarating and free, and both she and the big cat enjoy the feeling of the air against her face and the smell of the early morning remnants hanging around - drops of dew, wisps of the scent of a deer and a squirrel who moved through earlier.

Perhaps it should be harder to believe, the entirety of her new reality, but things are difficult to ignore when her paws are tan and large and she can feel the slide of her claws when she extends them to get a better grip.

_[Here,]_ Derek says in their heads, and Lydia slows herself down, leaping up in a tree because her eyes can take in the whole of the woods and still be able to focus down to a single blade of grass. _[The Nemeton.]_

_[Loren’s body is gone,]_ Scott says, and sounds surprised. _[Where did it go? Did the hunters take it?]_

Lydia slinks forward on the branch she’s poised on - strong and stable, without hollow portions that would buckle beneath her weight - and looks closer to the edge. Above her, there’s a nest of young birds waiting for their mother to return with food, and she ignores the almost deafening chorus of their cries to hone in on the massive tree stump in the clearing. The others, as if they also sense the bubble of power, hang back at the edge of the tree line.

_[There’s no one else in the woods near us,]_ Allison tells them from overhead, swooping a lazy lookout circle against the blue sky.

_[Maybe they didn’t take Loren’s body,]_ Lydia thinks at them. _[Maybe something else happened - maybe it just became part of the magic here.]_

_[I’ll check it out,]_ Stiles says, and a second later, Lydia sees the fox trot out away from the bushes it was disguised beneath. He moves slowly at first, and then makes a few leaps towards the stump, sniffing around the edges until he stops abruptly, both ears going rigid and tail stilling. _[The cross bolt, it’s still here, in the grass. But something smells... weird.]_

Across the clearing, Scott shifts up onto his hind legs, paws out in front of him. _[Weird, how?]_

_[Weird like unnatural,]_ Stiles answers. He creeps around the cross bolt, which Lydia can now see as a flash of metal against the otherwise green of the grass. _[I think... I think it’s poison.]_

Derek is being very silent, for being the one who insisted they all come out here.

_[Is this what you wanted us to see?]_ Lydia thinks at him. _[Did you know it was poison already?]_

_[My wolf could smell it,]_ Derek replies, a bit smug.

The shadow of Allison’s wings glides across the clearing, half covering Stiles and the cross bolt lying in the grass. _[So we’re dealing with hunters who routinely use deadly poisons in their weapons,]_ she says.

_[That’s bad,]_ Scott says, _[but not really surprising?]_

There’s something else, though, something Lydia can’t quite name. The air shimmering around them is humming with the Nemeton’s magic, and she can feel it through her veins - a buzz, an itch, a movement just beneath her skin. But that’s not what’s bothering her. The cougar is on edge, and so is she. If she still had her human body, she would swear that all the hair on her arms would be standing on edge.

She looks around, but can’t quite place what it is that she’s sensing. There’s something _wrong_.

Stiles, near the Nemeton, is batting a bit at the cross bolt like he’s trying to turn it over to get a better look. _[I can’t tell if it was removed by someone or not,]_ he says. _[There’s too many smells on it to really get that close, and I’m not great at identifying the ones I can get.]_

Lydia is only half-listening. She turns, creeping back towards the trunk of the tree across the outstretched branch, feeling the cat’s mind automatically quiet her movements until she is nearly silent. There’s something there, in front of her - something that she can see but not see, see with a sense she doesn’t really understand but leaves a sour taste on the back of her tongue. It looks almost like a shimmer of glass, only it’s just in the air, and she can only make it out, even with the clarity of her cat eyes, when she turns her head just so to examine it.

It looks almost like what she imagines a force field would be.

From up above, Allison says, _[There’s a car pulling into the woods, maybe a quarter of a mile out from you.]_

And then, Lydia knows.

_[It’s an alarm,]_ Lydia says.

_[What? What do you mean, an alarm?]_ Scott asks.

Lydia is moving, down from the tree, claws sinking deep into the bark and then vaulting her down until she’s on the ground and in the bushes. She isn’t sure if it’s the cougar’s mind or hers - maybe it’s both. She’s suddenly very afraid, more afraid than she was last night, because the cogs of the situation have clicked into place.

_[It’s a magical alarm, it’s a_ trap, _and we walked right into it!]_ she yells at them.

She sees Allison’s shadow again, and then the other girl says, _[Okay, they definitely have guns. I am seeing guns, and firepower, and they aren’t tourists.]_

_[Hunters!]_ Scott says.

_[How did they know?]_ Stiles asks, and they are all moving, through the trees again. _[How could they have magic? Loren told us that they wanted the Nemeton for-]_

_[They already have some magic,]_ Lydia interrupts. She feels sick - she should have seen this. Such a glaring, obvious thing, and she was so caught up in the rest of it that she completely overlooked it. _[How would they know how to hunt magic if they hadn’t already managed to_ acquire _some?]_

Allison swoops overhead as the rest of them crash through the trees, too panicked to be as quiet as they should be.

_[Head south, they are coming from the north,]_ Allison instructs, and the cougar seems to know which direction this is without Lydia having to stop and figure it out. Around her, the forest feels alive and terrified. She can see twitches in the leaves that aren’t coming from the wind, and movement of insects in the ground that is following the same escape route they are taking.

Derek bounds over a fallen log. _[We need to shift back.]_

_[To human?!]_ Stiles exclaims. _[Are you crazy? They’ll mow us down if we can’t move this fast!]_

_[It’s been nearly two hours,]_ Derek says, and even in the thought-speak, Lydia can hear the words like he ground them out through clenched teeth. _[I shifted before you, to follow your scents to the house.]_

_[Oh, god, we forgot about the time limit,]_ Scott says.

Derek doesn’t even waste time with answering. The wolf stops and watching the change back is just as jarring as seeing the transformation in - he lurches forward a bit, front paws losing their fur and lightening, turning into fingers as the rest of him creaks and pops to recreate the human muscles that run beneath his skin. It takes only a minute before he’s fully himself again, wearing a pair of boxers that, in any other situation, Lydia feels would be hilarious. Her cat senses can see the tremor that works its way through his body - he’s exhausted.

The weariness hits her between the eyes, too, but she’s feeling too much adrenaline to really give in to it.

_[How much time do we have?]_ Allison asks, coming in low between tree branches with nearly-silent flaps of her wings.

“Maybe another twenty minutes,” Derek says. His voice sounds strained. He’s got to be cold without anything else to cover up with. “Get yourselves out of here.”

_[And what about you?]_ Lydia asks. _[You can’t stay here, not like that.]_

“I’ll shift again and get home,” he replies.

Stiles’ fox bounds ahead and perches on a low-hanging tree branch, pointed nose held high. _[To the burned-out shell of your house?]_ he exclaims. _[Dude, you can’t live there. You’re in the woods, they’re going to find you, easy.]_

“I’m not living in the _house_ , Stiles,” Derek growls. “I’ve rented an apartment to stay in while I sort things out with the insurance.”

It’s a bit of a wake-up call, like being splashed with cold water, to remember that Derek is only here to deal with the fallout of his entire family being killed in the fire all those years ago. Lydia files that knowledge away, to think on when they aren’t in immediate danger of being tracked down, because it’s probably important - Derek’s house is on the property, and Loren had said that his family protected the land. It means something, she just isn’t sure what yet.

“Get yourselves out,” Derek hisses, again.

_[Don’t be a martyr,]_ Scott tells him, but seems to heed the advice anyway and starts off. Bears are faster than Lydia had actually expected when they really want to move.

_[They know we’re here,]_ Allison says, _[so we get home and figure out what our next move is tomorrow.]_

It’s hard to think of a next move when there is the realization that the people hunting you have magic they can use against you already.

_[Don’t be seen,]_ Lydia warns them. They have less than twenty minutes left, and the last thing she wants is to have to shift somewhere out in the open just to get herself back home. Wandering up her drive in her underwear isn’t going to keep suspicions away. _[And everyone be in touch later.]_

There’s a collective agreement, and she lets the cougar’s brain take over to maximize speed, heading to the edge of the woods and through the tree-lined yards to get herself back to her parents’ house.

\--

Stiles is standing in his kitchen, trying to decide if he feels calmed-down enough to try actually eating something (debatable), when he sees the flash of black out the window between the kitchen and the living room.

“God _dammit_ , Derek,” he hisses, as he opens the door enough to let the wolf in. “I’m serious, stop _doing_ that, I already have enough anxiety problems without you trying to take more years off my life.”

Derek doesn’t say anything when he shifts out of the wolf, but his whole body shakes a bit afterwards, like muscles completely ridding themselves of the canine, the way a dog shakes after taking a bath.

“I think you’ll live,” Derek tells him, a bastion of sympathy.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” Stiles asks. “You were supposed to go back home, remember?”

“I can’t get to my apartment without being seen,” is the answer.

“So you thought you’d pop by to inflict some terror on me? Thanks for stalking, bro.”

Derek growls at him, which would be hilariously wolf-y if Stiles wasn’t still completely shaken by the events of the day already. “You were closest, and I know where you live because of your father.”

“Oh, Sheriff, right,” Stiles says, and gets it. His dad had helped a lot with the investigation into the Hale fire, even though the whole thing had proved inconclusive. He knows his dad thinks arson was the cause, but they never managed to pin it down to anything - insurance settled is as an electrical fault in the wiring. “So you came here to, what, borrow some of my clothes to get home in? No offense, but I’m not sure my stuff will fit you.”

He isn’t entirely sure how he feels about leading Derek up to his room, but he does it anyway. He finds a pair of sweats and a t-shirt that’s stretched and loose from too many tumbles through the washing machine and throws them over, booting up his computer as Derek slips them on. He’s halfway through checking his emails when he hears his dad come in through the kitchen door.

“Stiles?” his father calls up, and Derek goes rigid in the corner, gesturing angrily towards the door.

Stiles jumps up, trips on the edge of his blanket, and then gets to the door just in time to avoid his father opening it himself. “Yeah, dad?”

“You haven’t been in the preserve recently, have you?”

Stiles’ heart drops down to his chest. He thinks he can feel every beat of his heart in his throat, choking him and threatening to spill out all the secrets. He trusts his father, but this - this isn’t stuff you just go around telling your parents about. Not when death is involved, death at the hands of crazed hunters with poisoned weapons and magical motion alarms.

“No, why would I be?” he replies, and prays to whatever deity listening that it’s nonchalant enough to pass the inspection.

His father’s face freezes for just a moment, and then smoothes over.

“There have been some reports of kids doing dangerous stuff there,” his father said. “Some hikers found discharged weapons, and have asked the office to do an investigation to figure out who the culprit was. Weapons like that, it can be dangerous to people just going through the woods.”

“No, I haven’t - wait, hikers?” Stiles says, mind furiously backpedalling. “You said hikers found discharged weapons?”

“I don’t want you near that place while we look around, do you understand me?”

Stiles nods, maybe too hard. “Yeah, got it, message received. You... you think some kids did it?”

“Hikers said they found evidence of firecrackers and beer cans, you know,” his father tells him, and shrugs - he looks tired. “We’re just going to see if we can find the kids responsible to make sure the dangerous behavior stops.”

“Yeah,” Stiles says, on auto-pilot. His mind is racing. “Yeah, I got it. I’ll be careful, dad.”

His father nods, satisfied, and turns back towards the stairs before pausing. “Oh, and order some pizza for dinner tonight, will you?”

“Sure,” Stiles replies. “But I’m ordering vegetables on your side.”

He closes the door with a soft thud and practically throws his back against it, arms stretched across like he will bar someone entry. He stares at Derek, still standing nearly motionless in the shadows of the room’s corner.

“Oh, god,” he says. “The hunters have gotten my dad involved. My _dad_. They know there was more than one of us there today - how do they know that?”

“Whatever magic they had set up, it felt us,” Derek replies, but he looks just as lost. Magic obviously isn’t his strength, either. “It probably alerted them to how many intruders there were.”

“And now they are looking for us, Jesus!” Stiles exclaims. He moves across the room and kind of collapses on his bed, mind a furious race between thoughts and emotions he’s too tired to be able to name. He sighs and stares at the ceiling, trying to sort things out. “They’ll bring people in for questioning if they think they are tied to the weapons in the woods, and that’ll be all the hunters need. They’ll know who we are, and they’ll come after us.”

Derek slinks out from the corner a bit. “We need to be more careful.”

“Says the dude who was wolfed out for, like, half of today,” Stiles quips.

Derek bares his teeth, but it’s a lot less threatening when he’s human. “ _Everyone_ needs to be more careful. These hunters? They mean business. They’ll kill without a second thought.”

“We’re just _kids_ ,” Stiles tries, but it’s pretty weak. They aren’t just kids anymore, are they?

“Tell the others,” Derek orders.

Grumbling, Stiles reaches for his phone, but only because he was going to do exactly that anyway. Derek moves towards the window - like he’s going to scale the porch down, like some kind of burglar - and Stiles calls, “Hey, yo, stop. We don’t even have your number, the least you can do is give me that.”

Derek frowns, but moves to Stiles’ desk and sloppily scribbles numbers on the open page of Stiles’ chemistry notebook.

“No one goes back into the preserve without my permission,” Derek says.

“Who died and made you the leader?”

Stiles gets another snarl for that. “It’s still my family’s property,” Derek tells him, low and somewhat quiet. “And we don’t know what other traps are waiting for us.”

“You know your old house is probably bugged, too,” Stiles says.

Derek’s face slackens a bit, like he hadn’t thought of that but wasn’t fast enough to completely suppress his surprise. Then he looks at Stiles again, hard, and Stiles sighs.

“Yeah, yeah, I got it, I’m texting right now,” he explains, and by the time he looks up from his phone, Derek is gone. “Freak.”


	3. The Unknown

“I understand that it’s been very hard for you to come all the way down here,” Dave, the insurance rep, says, in a voice that actually might be sincere only because he has records of the last time that someone in the Hale family had to fill out paperwork regarding payouts. “I appreciate it, and I’m going to try to make this go as smoothly as possible.”

“Thank you,” Derek says, and it’s mostly on reflex. Staring down at papers doesn’t make him feel bad; thinking about Laura bleeding out on the side of the road makes him feel bad, and signing his name to legal documents doesn’t dredge up the imagery nearly as vividly as simply getting behind the wheel of his own car does.

Dave gets a handful of papers and lays them out in front of Derek, indicating all the places where Derek needs to sign.

“I assume that you have the same bank account that the original policies were paid into,” he says, and Derek mumbles confirmation. He’s glad now that Laura thought to make the account a joint one between them ( _”This isn’t just for me, Derek, this is the money they would have wanted us to keep to live on._ ”) and then feels guilty that such a feeling could swell up in his chest like that - he’d rather have his sister than the insurance payout. He’d rather have Laura’s wisecrack comments than touch the money that came to him afterwards.

Still, he signs the papers, feeling like a robot, unable to really focus on the words in front of him.

“And we’ve been sent her possessions from the Colorado State Patrol,” Dave tells him. The man pulls out a box from under the nearby table, and Derek nearly chokes glancing into it. Laura’s favorite plaid shirt is on-top; she always wore it over things, camisoles, and it must have been next to her in the car when the accident happened because she’d gotten warm, as she always did, while she was driving. Just taking in the pattern and colors causes the room around Derek to swim in his vision, and he has to look away, to tear his eyes from the memories.

“There’s also a duffel bag, from the trunk,” Dave says. Derek can hear the sympathy in the man’s voice now, loud and ringing and bitter. “I just need you to sign that you picked up the items, and that they were delivered to you today.”

“Yeah,” Derek swallows hard, and isn’t even sure that he signs his own name at all on the line.

Derek carries the bag and the box out to his car and has to just sit for a long while with his hands on the wheel - at 2 and 10, the way his father had taught him out on the highways just past the preserve. He wheezes long, shallow breaths and closes his eyes, forehead pitching forward until it makes contact with the leather. He thinks of Laura and their apartment in New York. He thinks of the nights after the fire, just trying to remember how to survive, how to keep his body moving when it felt like his soul had been ripped away, and how she’d told him to center, try to focus on something so minute and unimportant that it conjured no images or nostalgia.

He stares at his thumbnail and waits until the tightness in his chest has dissipated somewhat - it’s difficult to get emotional over a thumbnail. Then he starts the car and drives to his rented unit, knowing that he has to go through Laura’s things, and that if he puts it off, it will only be that much harder.

As he sets the box down and begins methodically pulling things out, trying to be as clinical as possible, he wishes it were the first time he’d done something like this. The first time he’d met death so keenly and felt its presence, a twist of a knife already slid into his gut.

Laura’s duffel is easy: a handful of cosmetic items and only a few items of clothing, none of which have any significant emotional value, and Derek feels a little better. It was oddly grounding to go through things that could belong to anyone - it wasn’t even her normal toothbrush, just a smaller one she’d bought on the way after she’d forgotten her own in her haste to leave.

He sets the duffel aside, and then, as an afterthought, kicks it under the bed. Better for it to stay out of sight until he decides what he wants to do with it.

The box is harder. Her shirt still smells like her when he shakily lifts it to his face, and part of him wonders if it’s creepy to still know the scent of her favored perfume. Derek drops it on the bed like it’s burnt him and blindly reaches for the next item - her wallet. Laura never liked carrying a purse, and she kept her wallet in her back pocket. It was easier, she’d said. Easier to keep things organized and together.

His fingers are shaking as he opens it up. There’s nothing of value in it, really: two crumpled $1 bills and a handful of pennies in the coin purse. Her driver’s license, where she stares at the camera with an expression Derek had seen a hundred times before, her eyebrows curved up in annoyance. He’s choking back tears by the time he gets to the few photos she kept stuck in-between credit cards and frequent buyer cards. There’s one of the whole family, taken when Derek was ten and everyone was still alive, and another of just him and Laura. It’s a candid, a Polaroid from one of those new cameras made to look vintage and thirty years older but printing digital pictures at the touch of a button. They are both laughing at something, and Laura’s face is upturned towards the sky, and Derek can’t hold any of it anymore when he sinks down to the ground.

He doesn’t even make it to the bed. He just half-kneels, half-sits on the stiff carpet with one leg tucked painfully beneath him and tries to muffle the sounds in case his neighbor his listening. He cries like he hasn’t cried since the deputy told him that his house had burned down and most of his family had been inside it. He loses track of what’s going on around him, because the only things that matter have already been ripped away - a hole that throbs in his chest in time with his own pounding heart beat.

After, and he doesn’t know how much time has passed, his eyes feel like sandpaper when he drags the back of his wrist across them. Everything is blurry and distorted, even after he stumbles to the bathroom and splashes cold water on his face. He thinks he feels drained enough to do the rest of the box - better to do it now, when his emotions are spent, than tomorrow when the whole thing will repeat itself.

He puts the photograph of himself and Laura in his own wallet, and then fumbles through the rest of the box, because there isn’t much. An ice scraper that he knew must have been wedged in the backseat and a few old magazines Laura tossed there when she was done reading them. The owner’s manual for the car and the insurance cards that were kept in the glove compartment. And a bag of everything else that was apparently too small to be kept out of the plastic.

He throws it on the bed on top of the plaid shirt, and then stops. He grabs it again and looks closer.

Laura’s key ring is in there, and with it is the key to the car, which is mangled beyond all repair in a junk shop somewhere, and the key to their apartment’s front door. But there’s also another one, and he doesn’t recognize it.

Derek peels the foreign key off the ring with his nails and holds it up. There’s a bit of plastic right at the end, where it sat on the ring, and it’s a vivid red. It looks very new, which is jarring. Derek doesn’t know what it would have been for.

After some consideration, he loops it onto his own key ring.

Beneath his skin, he feels the magic buzzing. He knows it’s stupid to shift for personal reasons, particularly after they were found out only the day before. But the wolf doesn’t feel emotions like he does, and he needs to lose himself to that - his head is overloaded, overwhelmed, loss clouding and twisting everything he sees. He _needs_ to get away from it.

The sun has gone down, so it’s easier to slip out. He doesn’t bother with shoes, since they’ll only get shredded in the process, and sticks to the shadows as he edges along the line of buildings. It’s not the greatest part of town, the rent-by-the-week condominiums, and he’s grateful for the silence as he moves. Once he reaches an area he knows he can run from, he takes off the rest of his over clothing and shoves it in a trash can. He’ll come back for it after.

The shift into his wolf isn’t really surprising or strange anymore. It feels like just parts of himself slotting into place, along another line and axis. When the wolf brain opens up, Derek lets it take hold completely. The wolf wants to run, wants to pound the ground until there’s nothing left, and he lets it. He bounds into the woods, vowing to steer clear of the clearing and the Nemeton and the burnt shell that used to be his house, and just runs.

\--

Lydia calls them over the next day, under the guise of “studying”, which really doesn’t work if they include Derek. Stiles is the one to text a message to Derek, and when Scott asks how Stiles got the man’s number, all he gets is a mumbled reply of, “because he’s creeptastic, that’s why,” and decides not to ask about it.

It takes about twenty minutes, but they all end up in Lydia’s family room again.

“Now that we know they’ve got magic already, and enough of it to make a trigger system around the Nemeton, we need to be more careful,” Lydia tells them, applying a new coat of paint to her nails that is somewhere between pink and red. “There’s really no telling what they can do.”

“Do you think they can find us?” Scott asks. He’s worried about his mom, and what would happen if one of those hunters follows him home. Would they assume he hasn’t told her anything and let her go? He doubts that - they’d need to clean up the mess they’d leave behind, and it’s almost too much to really think about.

Lydia flips her hair over her shoulder. “I don’t know. Unless we shift, or if the magic did something to us to alter our essence on some kind of base foundation...”

“So we just don’t shift?” Stiles asks.

“They would have come after us already,” Allison says. “If they had to set up something in the forest, then the only thing it seems that they can track is movement, and they just assumed we’d be back for the Nemeton.”

“You are assuming that they guessed originally that there was more than one of us,” Lydia says.

“She’s right,” Derek agrees, from the corner, with his arms crossed over his chest like he’s furious he has to be there. “They probably only thought there was one, just like there was at the end.”

“That Loren found someone to pass it down to and that was it,” Stiles finishes.

Lydia had set out some lemonade for them, and Scott pours himself a glass and leaves it untouched on the end table next to the chair he’s in. “And now they know there’s five,” Scott says.

“Maybe not,” Allison points out. “I don’t know how many of us crossed the alarm barrier. It might only have been Stiles.”

“And definitely not Allison,” Stiles says. “She was too far in the sky, they’d catch every bird that flew over the preserve if they were tracking that area.”

There’s a period of silence. Scott can hear the tiny clicks of Lydia’s brush against the glass bottle, and the tapping of Stiles’ fingernails nervously against the coffee table, drumming out the rhythm to a Metallica song that had been on the radio on the drive over.

“So,” Scott starts, slowly, trying to piece everything together, “they know there’s at least one of us. But do they know if we’re human?”

Derek starts like he hadn’t thought of that, and Lydia’s nail brush stills.

“That’s it, isn’t it,” Stiles murmurs. “Keep them from finding out we’re human.”

“Keep them from following us home,” Scott says.

Allison glances at Derek, but doesn’t say what Scott assumes she wanted to - that not everyone even has a home. Derek’s left his keys on the coffee table, though, and Scott looks to them despite not wanting to, because he’s curious. The guy has to be living somewhere, and it can’t be the house that burned down in the preserve itself. He glances at the keys, and then away, and then back again.

“Hey,” he says, and reaches, before he can think of the consequences of it, like possibly Derek will get angry and rip his arms out of his sockets or something - Derek’s got a vibe like that, it’s a bit off-putting. But Scott’s fingers find the cold metal and he lifts them up. “You’ve got the same type of key as my mom.”

“What?” Derek snaps. He doesn’t sound as angry as Scott anticipated.

“The safe deposit box key,” Scott says, and points to the one with the blue plastic on the top. It’s the same one that he sees in the drawer where his mom keeps the important papers and the bills after they come in the mail, littering the bottom of the wood with some old paperclips and rubber bands, and a couple of pennies. “Beacon Hills Bank and Trust.”

In less time than Scott thought was possible, Derek has crossed the room and snatched the keys out of Scott’s hand. He stares at the metal, and turns it over a few times. “This is to a safe deposit box?”

“Yeah, but... how did you not know if you’ve got the key for it?” Scott asks.

For a long time, Derek doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even look up, which is weird, and Scott feels inexplicably guilty.

“This was with my sister, when she died,” he says, finally, voice low and soft. “They gave it to me with her possessions. But that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why not?” Stiles asks.

“Because my sister never made it here,” Derek replies. When he looks up, his eyes are haunted, but clear. “She was killed by a drunk driver before she made it back to Beacon Hills.”

Lydia very carefully closes the lid to the nail polish. Even with her hands held out in front of her, fingers spread as if she’s giving the color time to dry, she still looks oddly intimidating. There’s something about the way she holds her shoulders; Scott can see why Stiles has been crushing on her since eighth grade.

“And it wasn’t your parents’?” she asks.

“No,” Derek says. “She’s never had this key before.”

Slowly, Lydia lowers her hands down to the table in front of her. The shine of pink-red on her nails is reflecting the overhead light a bit. “We need to see what’s in that safe deposit box.”

“Why?” Scott asks.

“Because his sister wasn’t killed on her way to Beacon Hills,” Allison says, breaking the quiet that settled over the room. “She was killed on her way _back_.”

Scott looks at Derek, whose face is an unreadable mass of confusion, disbelief, and something stronger, and a little bit closer - hurt, maybe. He’s got the same look that Stiles carried for several years, the same lines around his eyes that sometimes show up when Scott slips up and mentions something that Stiles’ mother used to like or do. He feels bad, because he was the one who mentioned it, and seeing that expression on _anyone_ feels akin to a punch in the gut, even if he doesn’t know much about Derek except for his penchant for leather jackets and the fact that now he turns into a wolf.

And the fact that his sister just died recently, after his family was burned to death in their home when Scott was ten.

Scott swallows hard, and says, “So do we go open the box?”

“We can’t just walk in,” Stiles says. “You need a signature and a pass code to get into the box, and you can’t just waltz in if you happen to have the key.”

“But he’s family,” Scott tries.

“He’d still need a court order, and that would take a lot of time,” Stiles tells him, shrugging. “I think it’s only descendents or children who can push to gain possession of a box after death, not siblings.”

Derek is pulling out his wallet, and Scott thinks, though he isn’t sure, that he can see the other man’s fingers trembling. Derek tugs free a photograph from the leather billfold and rather than look at the front with the image, he flips it over.

“I think I’ve got the number,” he says, and his voice is still wavering on the edge of something. “And the pass code.”

He hands it over sort of blindly, and Scott reaches for it without thinking. There’s a three-digit number scribbled in large, looping handwriting near the top, and then, beneath that, printed in a somewhat shakier and more controlled hand, a set of six more. He doesn’t want to, but can’t stop his hand from flipping the photo over. It’s Derek in the image, laughing and more open than Scott has ever seen in his limited time, and a woman who must be his sister. He feels guilty immediately, and turns it again to stare at the inked numbers.

“We still can’t get in there to open it,” Stiles reminds them.

“Of course we can,” Lydia says. She smiles when everyone else in the room turns to look at her. “We just can’t get in there when the bank is _open_.”

\--

_[This is the worst idea,]_ Stiles is moaning. _[This is absolutely the worst idea in the history of bad ideas. We’re going to get arrested._ I _am going to get arrested. My dad is going to arrest me.]_

_[Your dad isn’t going to arrest a fox that got in through the furnace vents,]_ Lydia says, snippish and light in the back of Allison’s mind. The view from above at night is mostly lit by car headlights and street lamps, and Allison wished that her eyes functioned better in the dark. In the daytime, she could have picked out individual blades of grass, and now, flapping her wings against the air that is resistant and difficult to find a warm up breeze in, she thinks her vision isn’t much better than when she’s human.

But she trusts Lydia’s eyes, and hopes that the others will be able to sense anyone coming in their direction.

_[No, but my dad WILL arrest me when they find me standing in my BOXERS inside a locked bank at night,]_ Stiles shoots back.

_[Then I would make sure you take care of those cameras and stay out of sight,]_ Lydia says, sweetly, and Allison hears a small snort in her head that she thinks is Stiles.

They’ve almost reached the bank, and Allison can see Scott and Derek already there, as human, sitting across the road in Derek’s car. All five of them would draw too much unwanted attention, but with only two, they are easy to ignore. Lydia stays poised on the tree line and out of sight; she, too, would cause a commotion if seen. But her eyes can find the vent openings on the roof better than Allison’s can.

_[Do you have the key?]_ Allison asks. _[I can’t see anyone nearby, but I’ll do another pass just to make sure.]_

_[Yes, I have the key,]_ Stiles says. _[And I better not get roasted when a furnace turns on or anything.]_

_[It’s not cool enough to need a furnace, Stiles,]_ Lydia’s voice says. _[And besides, the stacks you’ll be going through are for natural ventilation - they should lead down into the ducting, and from there you can climb through until you find one of the grates leading to the interior.]_

Allison rides the wind around the bank, but there’s not much activity at night in this area of town. She focuses on the cars as best she can anyway, and can make out faces by the lights of the dashboards, but all of them are focused on their driving.

_[I think you’re clear,]_ Allison says.

Stiles’ fox scurries up the side of the bank using the metal grating that is descending down in a mish-mash of pipes, tubes, and metal plates. Allison has never seen an actual fox do that - but then again, she doesn’t know any other foxes that possess human intelligence and problem-solving skills.

_[Down the duct, and when you get in, make sure you hit the cameras first,]_ Lydia instructs him. The fuzzy, white-tipped tail disappears down one of the stacks just as Stiles’ voice says, _[Oh, DISABLE the cameras? I thought you wanted me to perform a song and dance in front of them. Good thing you’re here to tell me these things!]_

_[He gets short when he’s nervous, doesn’t he,]_ Allison comments, and opens up the thought-speak to include Scott and Derek sitting in the car across the street. With the street lamp over their heads, she can see Scott’s mouth widen into a smile. He looks up out the windshield, and she doesn’t know if he can see her or not, but still, the action makes her heart clench up, even in her hawk body.

There’s a period of nothing, with Allison perching on a branch just so that any bird-watchers in the area, if there are any, aren’t confused trying to figure out what a hawk is doing hunting during owls’ time. She can’t see Lydia in the tree, but she knows the other girl is there, crouched low across one of the branches that can support her weight.

Finally, Stiles’ voice comes back in her head again. _[Alright, I’m in. There’s only three cameras here, anyway: front counters, vault, and safety box room. What a shoddy operation they’re running. I’m in the back room where they keep the screens, so I’m going to shift out to disable the safety box room’s feed.]_

_[Don’t leave any fingerprints,]_ Lydia warns, but Stiles must already be more human than fox, because there’s no response in Allison’s head.

_[You know,]_ Allison says, privately to Lydia only, _[I really didn’t expect breaking and entering to be on my list of new hobbies after moving to Beacon Hills.]_

She doesn’t get a reply, but she also doesn’t really expect one; for all Lydia’s bravado, Allison knows the same thought is going through the other girl’s mind. They’ve wandered into something that could seriously ruin them if they get caught, and on the other side, there are armed people hunting them who probably wouldn’t hesitate to shoot even once they found out that they weren’t even adults yet (aside from Derek).

If Allison stops to really think about what they are doing - the consequences, the reality, the aftermath - she’s going to start to panic.

To keep herself from dwelling on it, she flaps hard against the unmoving air to get herself back up into the thermals, and does another round of the bank’s block just to make sure nothing is happening.

_[Okay, I’ve got the camera disabled, and I found the extra guard’s keys in the drawer,]_ Stiles’ voice says. _[I’m going to have to shift back to human to open up the safety deposit box, and then I’ll let you guys know what I found inside.]_

_[Be careful, Stiles,]_ Allison says, just because she feels she has to say it, even now, after it’s obviously already too late should anything major go wrong.

Another period of silence, and all Allison can hear is the wind around her. She wishes it were daylight, so she had the full use of her vision - she feels more confident when she can see a mouse running through the weeds a hundred yards away. There’s a car over on 3rd Avenue that has paused at the intersection for longer than necessary, but when Allison swoops closer, she sees only a mother talking sternly to the two children sitting in the backseat.

_[I’m in,]_ Stiles says, a few minutes later. _[There’s nothing in here except for a box.]_

_[Like a cardboard box?]_ Allison asks.

_[No, more like some kind of keepsake box.]_

Maybe, despite what they thought, Derek’s sister had put family heirlooms into the safe deposit box rather than anything related to the house or the Nemeton at all. Allison feels a bit foolish, for a second. Maybe they jumped to the wrong conclusion immediately because they were all so overwhelmed by what was going on around them.

_[There’s a little clasp on it,]_ Stiles continues. _[I’m going to open it.]_

Allison doesn’t know when he does, since he had to shift back to human again, but she knows the moment Lydia starts screaming. It’s loud and piercing, and even though she can’t _hear_ hear it, it’s ringing through her head all the same, like an echo that just keeps reverberating. It startles her so badly that she falters, wings dipping too low, and she has to let the hawk-brain take over to keep herself up in the air.

_[Lydia!]_ she tries, and when she makes a pass, she can see Scott and Derek both covering their ears, so she knows Lydia’s thought-scream has reached everyone. _[Lydia!]_

_[Shut the box!]_ Lydia exclaims. _[Stiles, shut the box!]_

He’s human, so there’s nothing on his side, but Lydia’s screaming stops abruptly. Allison swings low, hoping to catch a glimpse of Lydia in the trees. _[Lydia?! What WAS that?]_

_[I don’t know,]_ Lydia says, and she sounds shaken - very shaken. _[I don’t know, you couldn’t hear it? It sounded like a hundred whistles all being blown at exactly the same time.]_

_[I didn’t hear anything except you screaming,]_ Allison tells her.

Then, Stiles says, _[Lydia?! Are you okay?!]_

_[Stiles, get the box out of there,]_ Lydia orders. _[Is it small enough that you can carry it?]_

_[It’s about the size of a pencil case,]_ he replies. _[I can probably carry it in my mouth.]_

That’s when Allison sees the car turn onto the bank’s road, moving fast and completely ignoring the stop sign. _[Guys?]_ she says, and soars closer to it. _[We’ve got company.]_

_[I need time to get out of here!]_ Stiles exclaims. _[It’s going to take a little longer with this thing in my teeth!]_

Allison starts to turn, to do whatever she can, but Scott and Derek beat her to it. They are both climbing out of the car and Derek has popped the hood. He’s got it propped up with the metal rod by the time the car - actually an SUV, silver and dirty like it’s been off-roading recently - reaches the next intersection near the bank. Allison goes closer to hear what is going on.

“-obviously can’t ever let you touch this thing again,” Derek is saying, and he sounds angry. He sounds like he’s arguing, pointing at various things inside the engine that she doesn’t know how to identify. “I _told_ you that you needed to rehook that valve when you were finished cleaning it.”

Scott, for as confused as Allison thought he looked initially, smoothes his face and falls into the routine beside Derek’s form. “I’m sorry, I thought I did. Can’t we just hook it up now and be fine?”

“Yeah, that’s not how it works,” Derek snaps. He grabs Scott’s hand and shoves it somewhere within the metal and coils. “Feel around. Can you feel the smooth section that lines up next to three bolts?”

The SUV has slowed down. They’ve spotted Derek and Scott standing in front of the car, and aren’t moving any further forward.

_[They don’t seem to be willing to do anything if there are people who might see,]_ Lydia says from her place hidden in the tree. _[They are talking about something inside the car.]_

Allison can’t see that clearly in the dark. _[Stiles?]_ she tries. The sooner they can leave, the better.

_[Almost out,]_ is the reply.

_[We’ve got thirty minutes left before two hours,]_ Lydia says.

The SUV rolls forward, and the window lowers. “You boys need some help?” a man asks, and Allison is surprised at how normal he sounds. They are obviously here for whatever is in that box - and they must have heard it, or been alerted to the opening, just like Lydia - but she thought they would be more... threatening. Immediately evil and identifiable. It’s hard, for some reason, to see them now, as they are: normal-looking guys sporting ball caps and stubble.

“No, thanks,” Derek says, still growly. “My dumbass brother just doesn’t know how to put things back together the way they were when he found them.”

“It’s not my fault!” Scott whines, and the two of them are pretty convincing. “You won’t even let me _drive_ it!”

_[I’m out!]_ Stiles says, and Allison turns to see the fox running across the roof. Derek does something under the hood, and then, with grease smearing his hands, steps back to announce curtly that he’s fixed it. He obviously heard Stiles, too.

“Be safe,” the driver of the SUV says, with a nod, and drives off leaving Derek and Scott to get back in the car. Scott leaves his door open for a few moments longer than necessary, and Allison watches Stiles scamper in to the back seat through the opening.

_[They’re going around to check the other side of the building,]_ Lydia says. _[Go, now, before they come back. Stiles, give that box to Derek.]_

_[Meet again tomorrow?]_ Allison asks. She can see Stiles shifting back to human as Derek starts to drive the car away. He must be exhausted, constantly shifting back and forth. She can feel her own energy waning and all she’s been doing is keeping a lookout.

_[Yes,]_ Lydia says, voice grim. _[And whatever you do, don’t open that box again.]_

Even if Allison was the one to have it, she doesn’t think she would have a problem complying with that order.


End file.
